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In India in the first millennium BC, the doctrine of karma developed among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists.
Common to each is an idea that how you act in this world has consequences, either for your later life or your future lives, depending on your view of rebirth and transmigration.
You reap what you sow from this flow different ideas about free will, engagement with the world or disengagement, the nature of ethics and whether intention matters, and more.
And these ideas continue to develop today.
With me to discuss Karma and Monuma Chatha, professor of indian philosophy and tutorial fellow, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford Jessica Fraser, lecturer in the study of religion at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Karen O'Brien Kopp, lecturer in asian religions at King's College London.
Karan, can you give us an overview of the doctrine of karma before we proceed?
Karma is a concept that we find in early South Asia.
It's important to the development of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, and it refers to a natural law that we can describe as causality.
It's cause and effect, but not generally.
It's more specifically concerned with human action and human agency.
So we can think of it as a theory of moral responsibility.
It gives us a guide on how to act in the world and how we weigh up moral justification for any one action.
So karma and karmic action affects the people around us, the beings around us, our society, but it also affects us personally, in spiritual terms, in psychological terms, in material terms.
And these effects can reverberate not just in this life, but in future lives.
So we see that karma is paired with the doctrine of transmigration and reincarnation, and it's also paired with the important notion of dharma, as, if you will, the expression of the ideal of moral action in the world.